On Kate Bush and why it’s fine
It’s hard to remember the last time so much righteous disappointment has been felt about so little. The first I heard about Kate Bush’s endorsement of Theresa May (“she’s very sensible and I think that’s a good thing at this point in time”) in Maclean’s magazine was when someone in my timeline posted a link to England My Lionheart and implied that — given what we now knew about Kate Bush — this song, with its references to London Bridge in the rain, flapping umbrellas, Shakespeare, the rolling Thames and Spitfires, needed to be reinterpreted, presumably in an altogether more sinister way.
On and on it went, throughout the day. One Kate Bush fan (@mxrtharose) suggested that that much of the indignation was an expression of “normal disappointment at feeling an icon has failed them.” Like so many of the criticisms, it told you quite a lot about a certain sort of music fan and actually very little at all about Kate Bush who, save for a moderately humorous 26 year-old song written for The Comic Strip’s film about Ken Livingstone, has resolutely steered clear of expressing a political opinion. What can you find on any Kate Bush record that allows you to extrapolate that, in the voting booth, she puts a cross next to the Labour candidate? And if you did, would it make her a better artist? Or would it make her an artist with whom you could merely have a conversation about how much you hate the Tories and not worry about causing a faux pas?
I’m not making excuses for Kate Bush because there’s nothing to make excuses for. For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with her about Theresa May, but I know what she’s driving at. Because, for that one hour-and-a-bit between Theresa May’s inaugural speech and the news that she had made Boris Johnson foreign secretary, it did rather seem like the sole grown-up in the Conservative clown car had stepped out of the wreckage with the bare bones of plan. Yes, relative to everything else that happened that summer and what has happened since then, that really was an hour you could get nostalgic about. But never mind. Perhaps Kate had to pick up her son from the station before the Boris bit happened. Hey, perhaps Kate even approves of Boris being foreign secretary. Let me reiterate once again. It doesn’t matter. Take my word for it. I listened to Side 4 of Aerial this morning, just to be super-sure. As the rays of the low winter sun streamed through my frosted windows, it sounded utterly life-affirming.
But, of course, this isn’t enough to assuage the worries of some people who feel that there needs to be some sort of absolute consistency on this. If we assume that being an artist who admires Theresa May makes you a disappointing human (it doesn’t, but anyway) and yet it’s ok to listen to your records — where do we draw the line? Some people mentioned Lidl England’s favourite prime time purveyor of upbeat consolation songs, Gary Barlow. Why should we hold his Tory affiliations against him, but not Kate Bush? Some people even set the controls to the outermost extreme of this argument, suggesting that if you enjoyed the music of Lostprophets before their singer was given life imprisonment for doing unspeakable things to small children, then surely — by the same logic — you should continue listening to their music? Only on social media can you travel, in the space of mere minutes, from Kate Bush expressing admiration for a female Prime Minister to what the guy out of Lostprophets did. Thanks, Twitter.
The odd thing about all this is that, actually, there is no consistency. And furthermore there doesn’t need to be. I think part of the problem here is caused by the word “rule” and the expectations with which the idea of a rule is freighted. In science and in mathematics, rules are non-negotiable. They exist irrespective of us. In art and morality, there can also be rules, but art and morality don’t exist in any comprehensible way outside the perception of the human beings who define those realms. In art and morality, the rules that apply are essentially rules of thumb. I’m not proffering this explanation as a view of how things ought to be. I’m proffering it as a view of how things are.
And actually, if you look at our differing reactions in instances where musicians have fallen short of expectations (a list, let me just reiterate, on which this Kate Bush thing doesn’t even register), you won’t find much consistency. The rule we apply for, say, Gary Glitter is different to the rule we apply to Michael Jackson. What humans actually seem to do in situations like this is a sort of equation which offsets moral failings against artistic merit. If the music wasn’t that great to start with, the knowledge of what that artist said or did eclipses our desire to hear their music. I’m not sure we even do this consciously. It’s a mental file we update as quickly as the ones on our computers. It’s no great hardship for me to never hear Gary Glitter again. By contrast, it’s clear that we all found it a lot harder to offset Michael Jackson’s failings against his artistic achievements. Quite simply, we didn’t want to stop listening to Thriller and Off The Wall — they were too good. So what happens now is that we tend to talk about the Michael Jackson who made those two amazing records as a different Michael Jackson to the one who enticed those children to his Neverland ranch.
A similar disconnect seems to have happened with Phil Spector. No Christmas is complete without A Christmas Gift To You, and neither do we want it to be. So we keep playing the record and zone out any thoughts that this might be the same person currently serving life imprisonment for murder. But, of course, we’ve now strayed an awfully long way to this point from the Kate Bush utterance which prompted this train of thought.
Tomorrow, on December 1st, as I have done every December since its 2011 release, I’m going to dig out 50 Words For Snow and I’m going to play it regularly and loudly all the way through to Christmas. She’ll have to do a lot more than express mild approval for a female Prime Minister to stop me.